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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What role does Wilson ascribe to human nature?

2. What causes economic theories to fail, in Edmund Wilson's estimation?

3. Where can integrity be attained, according to Wilson?

4. What do the arts need science for?

5. How many children per parent would families need to have for the world's population to reach 12.5 billion by 2050?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Wilson say is the relationship between human genetics and the development of culture?

2. How do the senses function as epi-genetic rules?

3. What is the purpose of the social sciences, and how does Wilson distinguish the social sciences from the physical social sciences?

4. How do patterns in mental development connect genes to culture?

5. What role does the incest taboo have in genetic and cultural development?

6. What role does Wilson say creativity has in survival and evolution?

7. What is volitional evolution, and what does Wilson say are its effects?

8. How do social factors influence genetic distribution?

9. How does art look through the gene-culture evolution paradigm Wilson offers?

10. What threats to contemporary culture does Wilson describe, and how is consilience useful in answering them?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How does the advent of symmetric multiprocessing computing change the face of science and scientific knowledge? Specifically, how does the ability to crunch enormous amounts of information in multi-variable formulas affect the ability of scientists to describe nature? Does it create a favorable environment for consilience of all the sciences? Or does it reduce things to the laws of statistical probability and math?

Essay Topic 2

How would you respond to a reviewer who wrote that after Wilson leaves his discussion of biology and reductionism, which were his fields of training, he loses authority, and ventures into fields he is not expert in, where his ideas about art and religion are off-base, and his argument about objectivity is tautological. Is this a fair critique?

Essay Topic 3

Are 'epi-genetic rules' really just another way of saying complex social factors that have to be experienced individually? Does Wilson really evade the complexity and individuality of experience and sensation and language use?

(see the answer keys)

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